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Archive for June, 2012

…and decided that the Southern United States should be hot, humid, and full of Waffle Houses.

Day one was a tornado of exhaustion, caffeine, sunscreen, sand, and hydrocarbons. After landing in Pensacola, FL with Catherine Carmichael of WHOI we got right down to business and headed off to Perdido to collect some really tiny tar balls. We spent most of the morning and afternoon crawling around with tweezers picking up oil patties the side of Hot Wheels tires. Next we went to Gulf Shores beach and found ourselves up to our nostrils in tar balls. Seriously the place was covered with huge patties. You could just sit down and fill your pockets with these things that look like fancy licorice candies, but smell like new pavement. It’s amazing to think about how long ago Macondo was capped and how much oil is still washing to shore all the time. Site three was Dauphin Island. The tar balls here were flatter and smaller that those in Gulf Shores but had less sand in them than Perdido. We ended the day in Gulfport, Mississippi, having gone through the Florida Panhandle and the 50 miles of Alabama coastline. Photos will be arriving soon!

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time, once again, for the White Lab’s band of intrepid adventurers to set off on a trans-national expedition of cultural exploration and scientific enlightenment! What will we be doing you ask? Well…

The Gist:

A lot of today’s research has been spent looking at the non-polar fractions of oil. Always the Quaker egalitarians, we hope to give the polar fractions of oil their due. Using GCxGC mass spectroscopy and FT-ICR analysis scientists hope to gain a better understanding of how Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf is weathering, slowly breaking down, and oxidizing over time. The problem is that the GCxGC and FT-ICR methods of analysis are both time consuming and expensive to run on every oil sample one runs across in the gulf. That’s where the White lab enters the game. Using simple IR spectroscopy we hope to characterize the levels of oxidation in the tar balls we are going to collect. This will give us a better idea of what samples we actually care about (not to say that we don’t love all tar balls, some are just more exciting than others…).

This is the preliminary goal of this trip: to gather the samples we need to look at how, why, and when oxygen is incorporated into oil as it weathers in the gulf. We are also looking at the bacteria partially responsible for this weathering. Right now the lab is looking at the bacteria in sediments living around coral on the ocean floor, but there is room to also look at the organisms potentially living in and on the tar balls we will be gathering as well.

Well, there it is. A trip to the gulf to play in the sand, soak in some sun, eat mountains of crawdads, dance some zydeco, and jam out to some seriously deep south tunes. We will also be doing gobs of science! I am fully prepared to return in a week, sunburned, tired, and smelling of tar. I pity the person who has to sit next to me on the flight home.

The lab group will be heading back to the Gulf of Mexico in a few days time and will be posting our activities to this blog.

In the meantime, here is a link to our work from our last trip that was published this past March in PNAS. In the paper, we discuss the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on a deep-water coral community.

The photo to the right shows Paramuricea coral thriving (left), but 11 kilometers away from the wellhead, coral have lost tissue and are covered in brown flocculent material (right).

An interesting article written by Chris Reddy and Rich Camilli from WHOI was just published in the Boston Globe. In the article the authors discuss how the handing over of over 3,000 confidential emails to BP is eroding the scientific process.